Raja Ravi Varma: The Complete Story
Hindu gods and goddesses, painted not as flat symbols but as living people in flowing silk, with soft skin and real faces, in the grand manner of European oil painting. Raja Ravi Varma gave India its most enduring images of its own myths, and then put them within reach of every household.
He was an Indian painter who fused European academic technique with Indian subjects, and whose printed pictures shaped how millions imagine the Hindu gods.
Gods made human
Ravi Varma painted scenes from Hindu epics and Indian life with the realism, depth and rich colour of European oil painting.
His blend of Western academic art with Indian subjects was new, giving gods and heroines a warm, human presence they had rarely had in painting.
The faces of the goddesses
He is especially loved for his images of Hindu goddesses and of elegant Indian women, often using real people as models for divine figures.
This rich portrait painting of sari clad women set a template that Indian calendar art, and later cinema, would follow for generations.
Art for everyone
Ravi Varma did something rare for a celebrated painter: he set up a printing press to make cheap colour reproductions of his work.
Suddenly his images of the gods could hang in ordinary homes and temples across India, making him one of the most widely seen artists in the country history.
The royal painter
Born into an aristocratic family connected to the royal house of Travancore, Ravi Varma painted maharajas and colonial officials as well as gods.
He won medals at international exhibitions, carrying Indian painting onto a world stage at the height of the colonial era.
Questions readers ask about Raja Ravi Varma
What is he known for?
Realistic oil paintings of Hindu gods and Indian women, and his popular prints.
Why were his prints important?
They put images of the gods into ordinary homes across India.
What style did he use?
European academic oil painting applied to Indian subjects.
When did he die?
In 1906.
Why his gods still look back at us
Ravi Varma fixed the faces of the Hindu gods in the popular imagination so firmly that Indian calendars, posters and films still echo his vision today. He took the grand technique of Europe and used it to honour his own culture, and his cheap, beautiful prints made high art a part of everyday Indian life.
His paintings now sell for record sums at auction and hang in major Indian collections, while his press, though it eventually failed as a business, changed the visual culture of a whole nation. Few artists anywhere can claim to have shaped how an entire people pictures its own gods, but that is exactly the legacy he left behind. His images were so widely copied and adapted that they entered the very fabric of Indian popular culture, shaping religious posters, advertising and the look of early Indian cinema. More than a century after his death he is celebrated as a national figure, and exhibitions of his work draw large crowds who come to see the originals behind images they have known all their lives. His grand mythological scenes hang today in palaces and museums across India, where they are treated as founding works of the country modern art, the bridge between its ancient stories and its new ways of seeing.